The largest marquee was where all of the food was served, with roast beef and ham, plum puddings, loaves and loaves of bread, fresh fruit, petit fours, and all the lemonade you could drink. There were about a dozen or so tables out on the lawn, all covered with white linen, and Sir Edward and his wife would walk the grounds making sure that everyone had enough to eat and were enjoying themselves.”
After refilling my cup and adding the milk for me, Mr. Crowell asked what I thought of Montclair and if it measured up to Jane Austen’s Pemberley. I said that it did, but I also told him that I doubted Jane Austen had used real people for her novels. Certain people may have influenced her writing, but it seemed impossible to me that there was such a person as Mr. Darcy.
Mr. Crowell, who insisted that I call him Jack, said, “It’s not my job to convince you, Maggie, but I have a feeling you want to be convinced.”
“I would think that if people believed Montclair was actually Pemberley, they would be beating a path to its door.”
“You’d be wrong, my dear. Here’s what I think,” he said, settling back into his chair. “Jane Austen didn’t want her identity known. When Pride and Prejudice was published, she identified herself only as ‘the author of Sense and Sensibility.’ Originally, her writings were for the entertainment of her family, but they convinced Jane that her stories should be published. She had a decent-sized following before Queen Victoria’s reign. However, most Victorians didn’t take to her. Silly mother, a lazy father, a fallen sister who wasn’t punished. The Victorians would have had the deflowered Lydia dying in the snow on the road to Longbourn. No, they were too serious for someone as lighthearted as Jane.”
“People started to rediscover her in the 1900s, but then came The Great War. Ten men from Crofton were killed outright. There’s a memorial dedicated to them on the village green.” After Jack mentioned the war, there was a long pause before he continued, and I had no doubt that someone he cared about was on that memorial. “The walking wounded, widows, and orphans were everywhere. No one was thinking about Jane’s tale of two lovers. Then it was the Depression, and right after that, we were again at war. Not much time for Jane.”
“Is there anything to support your idea that the Laceys and Darcys are one and the same?”
“It’s more than an idea, Maggie. My family has worked at Montclair longer than anyone can remember. My father’s father worked for the Laceys. He had met the Binghams, or the Bingleys, as Jane Austen called them. These stories were all passed down.”
But would Jane Austen have written a novel that often ridiculed people who could possibly be identified by their neighbors, for example, Mrs. Bennet, with her fragile nerves and poor judgment?
“Do you know when Jane first wrote the novel?” he asked.
“When she was twenty, so that would be about 1795.”
“But it wasn’t published until 1813,” Jack said, jumping in quickly. “By that time, the Laceys had been married for twenty years! If anyone was trying to figure out if these characters were real, they would have been looking at people in their twenties in 1813. Some of the characters in that book were already dead and buried by the time Pride and Prejudice was published.”
I was enjoying our conversation so much that I almost forgot about Pamela. She had sat there quietly for a while, but once Jack and I started talking about Pride and Prejudice, she started to walk around the room, looking at family pictures. I hoped she wouldn’t start opening drawers which, with Pamela, was a possibility. There was so much I wanted to ask Mr. Crowell, but Pamela had promised her brother she would have the car back to him by 7:00.
“Not to worry. If Pamela wants to go on ahead, I can drive you over to Stepton myself. Besides, I’d like you to meet my wife. She’s very keen on people who are interested in Elizabeth Bennet’s story.” After some discussion, I accepted Mr. Crowell’s offer, and Pamela left with her six eggs.
Shortly after Pamela drove off, Mrs. Crowell came in carrying groceries. Following a brief conversation with her husband and after handing him her shopping bags, Mrs. Crowell introduced herself. She was a very attractive woman with light brown hair, cut in a short, simple style, which accentuated beautiful dark eyes. She was wearing black slacks and an ivory turtleneck sweater, and after she sat down in a chair across from me, she pulled her long legs back so that she was almost sitting sideways. Obviously, this was someone who had been taught that a lady never crossed her legs.
“On its face, it seems difficult to believe. But I grew up very near to this village, and it has been a part of my family lore for generations.” Mrs. Crowell was even more sincere than her husband.
I realized how late it was only when Mrs. Crowell said she was going to start dinner. I was sure I had overstayed my welcome, and I had to get back to Pamela’s house.
“You are welcome to stay the night,” Mrs. Crowell offered. “We have a guest bedroom with its own bath, and please call me Beth.”
Jack jumped in. “I’ll ring over to Stepton. You can tell your friend that I’ll have you back at her house in time for the evening train to London. No worries.”
“I can hardly believe I’m saying this, but I accept.”
After dinner, the Crowells and I returned to the living room for tea. The remainder of the evening was spent discussing how it was that Jane Austen’s Fitzwilliam Darcy, a member of the privileged landed gentry, came to know Charles Bingley, the son of a man who had made his fortune in trade. Jack related the events that led to the lifelong friendship of the real William Lacey and Charles Bingham.
“The head of the Bingham family was George Bingham, a financial genius. Along with his brothers, Richard and James, they owned a large import/export business with warehouses in India and America. When the Revolutionary War broke out, the warehouses in New York, Philadelphia, and Charleston were shuttered. Once the war was over, George sent Richard to America to check on the condition of their properties, and he took Charles with him. But after a year, Richard sent him home. Compared to his colonial friends, who had been educated in England, Charles was coming up short.
“A Mr. Montaigne was hired to tutor Charles in the usual subjects a gentleman of that era would have been expected to know: Latin, French, science, mathematics, and the classics. Socially, George Bingham wanted Charles to be comfortable in any situation, including attendance on the king at the Court of St. James. For that, he turned to William Lacey, Jane Austen’s Mr. Darcy.”
“The Laceys were an old Norman family, their land grant going back to the twelfth century and the reign of Henry II. Will’s father, David Lacey or Old Mr. Darcy as Jane Austen called him, married Anne Devereaux, a pretty young lady from another of the old Norman families.
“When David Lacey died, young Will went over the accounts of the estate with George Bingham, the co-executor of his father’s will, and found out that all of his mother’s dowry had been spent on the remodeling and expansion of Montclair and that the estate was deeply in debt. Will decided that if he was to maintain the Lacey lifestyle, as well as provide for the proper support of his sister, Georgiana, he had to come up with other ways of making money.
“This is where George Bingham came in,” Jack continued. “He had a reputation for helping out some of England’s finest but financially stretched families. George and Will worked out a deal. In return for taking Charles under his wing, George Bingham would make the necessary loans to get Will Lacey out of debt as well as provide investment opportunities in the Bingham enterprises. That was the start of Charles and Will’s friendship. It was an odd pairing, but it worked because they balanced each other out.”